16 August 2010

We are conducting a study to compare the sharing intentions of
Facebook users to their actual privacy settings. We developed a
Facebook application that alerts users to potential privacy violations
based on their responses to a survey. The application will ask you
which information (work related, explicit, academic, etc.) you want to
hide from which profiles (co-workers, faculty, family, etc.) and then
compare this to your actual settings. Finally, you'll be able to view
a report of the inconsistencies (the application does not store the
actual data, just that an inconsistency was identified).

If you have any questions, please contact Michelle Madejski
(michelle.madejski at gmail.com) or Maritza Johnson
(maritzaj at cs.columbia.edu) — or, of course, me.
(Naturally, we have passed this study through the university's
Institutional Review Board.)